I'm sure we have all been in this position - you are in a meeting where ideas are being shared. Someone puts forward an idea and someone raises an objection. The raiser of the idea reacts as if they have just been punched in the face - angry, defensive, aggressive. Or sullen, withdrawn, silent. Fight or flight. And all because someone raised an objection to their idea. People tend to hold their ideas very tightly. They identify with them. They are their idea. So an attack on their idea is very literally an attack on them.

Or what about this one - you were just in a meeting and someone says to you "that was a pretty bad idea they raised.. what a fool they must be". In this case we are associating the idea with the character of the person who raised it. The idea was bad so therefore, by extension, they must be bad. We see both of these situations all the time. Both associating strongly with your own ideas, and conflating the quality of an idea with the attributes or character of the person who raised it, are things most of us do all the time, and they are both extremely unhelpful.

As a brewer, when you hook up a keg of beer to the gas and hook up the tap, one of the things you learn quite quickly (unless you really like drinking nothing but foam) is that the pressure of the gas pushing the liquid through the tube creates a resistance in that tube that poses the flow. The more pressure, the more resistance. Eventually the resistance becomes too much, creates turbulence and the tap will pour gas and foam rather than lovely beer. Electrical engineers recognise this phenomenon as well - the more current you push through a wire (the pressure of the electrons), the more the wire will resist their flow and cause energy to be lost as heat. Eventually the wire will get so hot that it will melt.

This is a well known phenomenon of many of the physical sciences. Whenever you push one thing into or through another thing, there is resistance and that resistance is proportional to the pressure doing the pushing - small pressure, small resistance. Large pressure, large resistance. Importantly, that resistance can build to a point where it will cause damage to the materials involved. Push too hard and the wire will melt or the pipe will burst. Pushing harder may actually get you less flow because the resistance is greater. So why am I telling you this? Because it applies to coaching as well, but unlike the physical sciences we often don't recognise it.

A long time ago (although not in a galaxy far, far away), a rather clever fellow by the name of Buddha pre-empted the discovery of neuroplasticity by a thousand or so years when he said something along the lines of

"We are what we have practised. What we practice today is what we will become".

I say along the lines of because there are dozens of different translations but the message is basically the same. That the things we practice become stronger.

If I were a neuroscientist I could say it like this -

"If it fires together, it wires together".

Neurons that fire together build stronger connections so that sequence of firing becomes easier in future. As we practice something, the neurons fire together, wire together, build strong connections and whatever it is we are practising becomes easier and easier. We are used to this when learning skills - as we practice we get better. At first we have to think about what we are doing and it is slow and clumsy but eventually our bodies take over and things become smoother and more skilful. The sport you are practising becomes easier. The language you are learning becomes easier.